True of course, but it’s good to avoid projecting one’s nostalgia for the past onto today’s cultural products. Shakespeare was good, better than anything since, Oscar Wilde was good and Louis Armstrong too. All of them better than Jimmy Page, that’s for sure!
The promoters of cultural products aim for the lowest common denominator, people in the music business are not Eastern European Jews as before but highly educated accountants and MBAs who know how to calculate their marketing moves with near-scientific precision, and as our educational system produces less educated less well-rounded people, as the economy promotes more of the lower class people, that lowest common denominator just gets lower. Who listens, who knows how listen to opera or even operetta today?
Overall I don’t disagree. But nostalga stuff aside, as was posted upthread, where is the Pink Floyds/Zep or insert widely lauded as genuinely great band here, in or of the last 20 years?
Sure, we all have different tastes and this thread proves that. But even in a subjective thing like taste in music there are still good and bad, better and worse, great and suck in the big picture.
I totally agree it’s a business now more than ever with bean counters and degrees ruling the roost. But the knockdown dragout ‘best’ of today/recently... well what is it and how does it compare to what came before? That’s the thing. Humans have to categorize. always have, always will.
I look at music the same way as politics. Liberals suck for quantifiable and demonstrable reasons. So do some bands/music. We believe our politics is correct for quantifiable and demonstrable reasons and likewise, some bands/music can be shown to be better or worse and why.
I guess it just comes down to ‘good’ and ‘popular’ being strangers 99.9% of the time.